Susan E. Alcock, who graduated from Easthampton High School in 1979 spoke. She is the director of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University in Rhode Island.

Although Alcock has gone far from home in her studies, the winner of a 2001 MacArthur "genius" fellowship, still considers Easthampton home, she said in advance of her talk.

“My family has attended school there for decades, with a few ‘valedictorians’ to our credit,” she said, beginning with her Great Aunt Priscilla Mahoney in 1918.

“Education often gets a bad rap, as something that gets ‘done’ to you and you are happy when it is over (why graduations are so joyous). But learning is, or should be, both a lifelong thing and there are an increasing number of opportunities out there for us all.”

She said that she is currently teaching Archaeology’s Dirty Little Secrets, an online class in which more than 35,000 “from all over the world, and from many languages, religions and points of view, are talking to each other, and I am learning as much as the students are.”